Tech Review: Technically Speaking, We're Not A Tech Book

Technology Review is not a technology magazine.

That's something that the title's vice president, sales and marketing Kate Dobson wants to make very clear from the outset. "We never bought into the new economy," she explains. "People put us there, but we never thought of ourselves that way. Every one of our articles includes a well-defined business benefit."

Hoping to clarify its market positioning, Technology Review has debuted a redesign that includes a new logo, tagline and cover look. By emphasizing what Dobson calls its "three core words" - business, opportunity and impact - the magazine hopes to better communicate its mission of highlighting the emerging technologies that will eventually impact business and society. "Our mission and content will remain mostly the same," she says. "But the way people processed information when we relaunched in 1998 is different from the way they process information now. The new design will have more visual clues."

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Technology Review debuted in 1899 as MIT's alumni magazine and, 99 years later, was relaunched as an independent nonprofit consumer publication. While the mag receives some money from the university - roughly 90,000 alumni pay the school's alumni office for subscriptions, and the bounty is forwarded to the appropriate bean counters - MIT is no longer picking up the lion's share of the tab; the school did not contribute any funds to the relaunch. Noting that the magazine did not grow to its monthly frequency until it was self-sufficient, Dobson adds, "The fact that we're owned by MIT doesn't mean a whole lot to advertisers."

Having grown its circulation from 92,000 in 1998 to the current 315,000, Technology Review is firmly established as one of the more articulate interpreters of technology and business trends. To an extent, the ad community has responded: according to the most recent Publishers Information Bureau data, the publication is up 26.7% in ad pages for the first eight months of 2003 versus the year-ago period; ad revenue has surged 36.2%, to $7.35 million.

Whether Technology Review will ever be mentioned by would-be advertisers in the same breath as The Economist and BusinessWeek, as the magazine's marketers hope, is another story. Even Dobson acknowledges the Technology Review's place in the pecking order: "When companies have less money or are feeling a little uncomfortable, they'll only buy the traditional business publications."

Still, Technology Review has been able to expand its slate of advertisers in recent months, mostly from A-list tech companies like Cisco, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft ("'The return of the brand-name advertisers' - sounds like a movie," Dobson cracks). The magazine has pushed into consumer electronics with ads from Pioneer and Philips, and has bolstered its automotive portfolio with the addition of Daimler-Chrysler.

While Dobson doesn't have any formal strategy for luring new advertisers, it's obvious that selling them on the demographic virtues of the Technology Review reader is a big part of it. The publication skews male (68%), with the reader's average age hovering around 48. Household income is approximately $208,000, while total asset value reaches $1.7 million.

"With these numbers, you'd think we'd do better with luxury goods [advertisers]," Dobson says. "We have BMW, but we don't have the Tag Heuers and Rolexs. We don't have any of the high-end alcoholic beverages." When asked why advertisers in these categories haven't warmed to Technology Review, she deadpans, "I guess it's our size. Size matters - I hear that all the time in my e-mail."

Still, Dobson is encouraged that advertisers seem to be "less allergic" to technology publications (uh, not that Technology Review is a technology publication) than they were over the last few years. She won't name names, but in the recent past she was told by a major automotive manufacturer that the company simply wasn't buying any tech publications. "That was a little hard to swallow," she says. "Everybody went lifestyle for awhile. There wasn't a whole lot we could do about it."

Though she cops to having issue-by-issue goals, Dobson is steadfast that Technology Review won't mortgage its credibility for a few extra ad dollars. "You won't be seeing, like, a special section on men's fashion - that's short-term thinking," she explains. "What do you do to replace that next year?" At the same time, look for the magazine to continue to tap MIT's extensive academic resources in order to provide the genre's most forward-thinking tech/business fusion. "I like to say that we're the Hebrew National of publishing," Dobson laughs. "But MIT is the higher authority we report to."

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